by Max Brand
You can’t afford to overlook it when a voice like that talks up inside of you. There is generally something behind it. And as I looked at those lights, I said to my horse: “It ain’t any use. That town ain’t big enough to hold the news that I want to find in it.”
But I jogged along into Marion Crossing and had a walloping time getting the hotel owner out of bed and prying a place to sleep out of him. He was a soreheaded old German that always went around with one suspender on and one suspender off and a big flapping pair of slippers that turned away up at the toes.
I said, nice and polite, would he tell me if Jigger Bunts and Bud Crandall had hit that town that evening.
He only growled: “For vot am I? A newspaper, ain’t it? Could I know yet all vot foolishness iss …?”
I shut him up quick. I was too tired and too mad to be bothered listening to a lingo like that. I asked him could he talk American, and if he couldn’t, I didn’t want to hear any of his yap, and would he show me a room before I broke him in two and fed the pieces to the dogs. Finally, I told him he should go out and see that my horse had all it could eat and a stall.
Well, I got to my room, but I couldn’t even go to bed, I was so sick. I just sat there on the side of that bed and held my head in my hands and thought. I mean, I tried to think, but I couldn’t.
Then I would say to myself: “The kid is well-raised … and he’s got a good education under his belt … and he ain’t going to step out and do anything that’s too foolish.”
But all the time I knew that I was lying to myself. I knew that he was eighteen years old. That’s the answer. I knew that he had come to what you might call the time limit and something had to happen to him. He had gone all winter only talking foolish, and now he would cut and smash something. I just didn’t know what.
But oh, how my hands had to get ahold of him. If I could only have gone to him or yelled to him, just to say: “Jigger, it ain’t so bad as all this. You’ve just manhandled a dirty crook who needed manhandling, and nobody is going to want to arrest you.”
Well, then I would say to myself that when he got into the other town—because now I knew that he had headed the wrong way and had gone all the way to New Nineveh.
I should think that even hearing that name, a man would have better sense than to go to a town like New Nineveh. There was nothing new about it, in the first place, except the front half of its name. It was just an awful mistake, that town was.
But there was my Jigger Bunts, poor kid.
Then I told myself that I would have to answer up to the boys back at the ranch if I didn’t find the kid.
I had just got that far in my thinking when I heard somebody downstairs.
“Will you stop that walkin’ around? The rest of us want to sleep!”
I forgot to say that I was not sitting on the side of the bed now. I was walking up and down. Because I couldn’t stand it, sitting still. I would have busted. When I heard that fellow downstairs yap, I ran to the door and jerked it open, and I yelled: “If you come here to this place to sleep, I’ve come here to walk. And by God, walk I shall. And if you don’t like the style of my walking, why don’t you come up here and show me another way of doing it.”
That was foolish, yes. It was boyish, crazy. But just then if a man had come up to me with a cannon in each hand and said that he wanted to fight, I would have wept with joy. That was the way I was feeling, if you can understand what I mean.
And I went back into my room and began stamping up and down the floor. It was amazing how much better that made me feel.
That was out West in the wild and wooly days, and perhaps you wonder how it happened that I didn’t have all the other roomers up there inquiring for the place where I wanted to be buried in the morning, after they had got through with me. But between you and me, the West as I found it was never really so bad and wild—except in spots.
And that night I was the bad and wild spot, and all the suckers in that hotel knew it, too, you had better believe me. All I heard after a time were groans.
“Please, stranger, I’m a hardworking man. I’d like to sleep, real well, if you don’t mind.”
Of course, I eased up and walked soft for a while after that. But that hotel wasn’t intended to have much peace that night. Because about an hour later, while I was swinging myself from side to side on the bed and trying to think of something to do, somebody else began to bang on the front door. And the poor old German had to go flap-flapping down the stairs again, dropping language all the way down something remarkable to listen to. You take it generally, a foreigner can always cuss in two languages a long time before he can speak either of them by grammar.
There was not much talk wasted down there below. There was just a stampede up the stairs, and my door was busted open, and there stood Pete and Charlie the sailor glowering down at me, with hope fading out of their faces little by little.
“Hell!” said Charlie. “You’re the gent that just come in from … oh, hell!”
Yes, they had heard the news a long time after I left, and they had made better time in than I had. Three more of the boys were coming along behind.
“Why didn’t you bring Wong, too?” I yelled.
“He wanted awful bad to come,” they said.
They didn’t see that there was something of the nature of a joke in what I had said.
No, they were not seeking jokes, and they were not making any jokes that night. You might say that they had used up all the laughs that were in their system.
They just lingered around, propping themselves against the wall and staring at each other very gloomy, too tired to stand up and too nervous to sit down.
When they said anything, it was in a sort of robber’s whisper, if you know what I mean.
“Well, chief, we thought that maybe numbers would come in handy. In case they had put him in the jail, you see.”
I smiled on them. It did me a lot of good, I can tell you, to smile down on them, very calm and superior.
“So that you could beat down the wall of the jail and fetch him out, I suppose,” I said.
They didn’t answer me. They didn’t need to. Charlie got out an old Colt that should have been wearing white hair, and began to rub it up and oil it up, very affectionate and thoughtful.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Pete said in that same sort of a dying whisper. “We didn’t know what we would have to do … I suppose he’s gone on to New Nineveh?”
I said I supposed he had.
“It’s too bad,” said Charlie. “They’re a mean bunch, over there. They hate their town so bad that they take it out on everybody that comes along.”
And he didn’t say that for a joke, either!
“But Jigger is only a fool,” said Pete. “Even over there, they will see that he’s a nice clean kid and no more, and they will not act like damned fools!”
Charlie answered: “Nobody but damned fools live in New Nineveh. Otherwise, why would they be there?”
They went on talking like that, nice and cheerful.
“Shoot a man,” said Charlie, “and then take him into a town … and when you get into town, refuse to be arrested … because it ain’t honorable …”
He couldn’t say any more. Of course he had picked up my note where I dropped it in the corral. The boys had had a peek at it.
And Pete said: “But the kid is going to be all right. He’s been raised pretty good by Tom Reynard. He has had fine examples held up to him of gentlemen conduct he has. Dalfieri, that low skunk! Things like Dalfieri has been held up to him. Gunfighters! Yes, that’s how a poor kid like that has been raised. My God, Reynard, I should have thought that you would pretty near die, you would be that sick with yourself!”
Yes, sir. You won’t believe it, but I’m repeating pretty close to the exact words that he used on me. After raising hell with the kid and with me for
most of the winter; after doing all the really effective lying about Dalfieri—it’s me that they blamed.
I ask you!
Then Pete broke out: “Have you telegraphed?”
It went through me like light through a chunk of ice. No! I hadn’t thought of doing that. They gave me one terrible look, and then we tore for the telegraph office. The operator was not there. We found him. He wanted to dress for the cold night, but we told him damn the cold night. and we helped him down to the office and watched him unlimber his key and begin to make it tick.
Then after a while he said: “All right. I got them.”
Pretty soon, he stopped ticking, having sent our message, and then he began to listen and write, and he read it out for us, what the ticker had said back. Which was plenty. It ran like this:
We want bunts as much as you do but he passed through
Too fast for us to catch him do you know his home address
(Signed)
New nineveh
We looked for a long time at that telegram. But there was no way of reading any other meaning into it.
You will admit that a telegram is a pretty poor place for a joke. But the people in New Nineveh were just like that. As Charlie the sailor said: “What could you expect from a lot of bums that never had any bringing up.”
Chapter Twelve
There were forty miles between New Nineveh and Marion Crossing. And while the boys were going back toward the hotel to talk things over, I decided that one man can work faster than three, especially when there are forty miles to be covered. So I got to the livery stable and showed them my tired horse and asked for a trade. I had dragged the owner out of bed at three in the morning, and so he wanted to charge me twenty dollars, but when I pointed out to him that although my pony had a Roman nose, it had a fine disposition, and when he saw that the poor brute wouldn’t kick when he slapped it under the stomach, he must have figured that it was not just tired to death but really would stand without hitching. For that Roman-nosed butcher and five dollars, he gave me a walleyed pinto with a roached back and thick legs all covered with long hair and a neck like the neck of a camel that you see in the circus. But I knew the points of that breed. It was one hundred percent Indian pony, and that kind are all cut out of one kind of leather.
So I took the pinto. The stableman stood by with a grin to see me saddle and ride my new horse. By that, I could guess that he had given me a bad one, and when I slid into the saddle, the cayuse turned off a barrel full of fireworks. However, I was too busy to be bothered with a bucking horse and I managed to get that idea into his head after a jump or two.
A minute later his hoofs were throwing chunks of snow higher than my head, and we were flying out of Marion Crossing on the New Nineveh road. I mean, it was called the road, but anybody who could tell where the road ended and the prairie began was a prophet right enough.
However, I was a pretty good guesser, and that pony was a game one. It hit along about eight miles an hour and stuck there steady as a lock. It slipped in the snow about as much forward as it did back, and nothing could put him off his feet.
It was a little after three o’clock, as I was saying, when I started out of Marion Crossing. And it was just half-past eight by my watch when I got into sight of New Nineveh.
Did you ever see any of those pictures of the retreat of the Grand Army—one of those camp pictures where the camp is just a dirty little spot on the snow and the wolves are sneaking around the horizon line?
New Nineveh looked just like that but more so. It was just big enough to be seen. And it was ornery enough to salt down the whole state of heaven, but still it looked pretty fine to me. And when I stood by the hotel stove beating some blood into my hands, I asked one of the men standing around waiting for a job to find him, if there had been any excitement around there lately.
He looked at me, and then he looked away at somebody else.
And a little long-whiskered goat in the corner said: “Nothing has happened in New Nineveh since we was hit by the cyclone.”
I hadn’t heard of any bad tornado hitting New Nineveh—more was the pity—and so I asked what storm he meant.
He said: “You look around, and you’ll see some of the marks it left behind pretty fresh still.”
Somebody else drawled: “Too damned fresh.”
I could see that they were talking around me and that they were saying things that meant a lot more to each other than they did to me. I decided to keep my mouth shut and just listen for a while, because when a Westerner doesn’t want to be forced, you can’t hurry him. Mostly, he’s always rushing. But when he decides to go slow, he takes a real ornery pride in his slowness. So I didn’t say a thing for a long while, and finally, I heard a man say that maybe I would have a chance to take a look at that same cyclone.
I said: “You must be mistaken, partner. I ain’t riding a horse of that brand.”
He only grinned.
“They’re out hunting for this hurricane now, and the boys particular wish to promise that they’ll bring him back here in town if they have to bust.”
“Somebody has been shooting up the town?” I asked.
And there was a sick feeling inside of me that maybe this would hook up with the kid—that maybe Jigger Bunts was the man that had been trying to wreck New Nineveh. There was one satisfaction—that no matter where he landed with his heels after he jumped into the air in that town, he couldn’t fail to hit somebody that needed hitting.
I know a good deal about the brand of man that they had New Nineveh. Once I hired a crew of hands there. But that is another story, as they say. It was nearly the last story, I can tell you, so far as I was concerned.
“You are a pretty good guesser,” said the chap with the whiskers, who seemed to be the designated talker for the crowd, him being about the hardest-looking case in the lot. “Yes, there has been somebody shooting up the town. A gent with a new way of doing things. He brings in the boys that he has shot up and leaves ’em at the doctor’s door while he stands around and waits for more trade. He has a fine, quiet way of working. He uses one sucker for bait to catch the others. He takes in the gents that he has shot up to the town where they have a whole lot of relatives. Understand? And then he goes and gets a room at the hotel for himself and his two guns …”
The two guns finished it off for me. I knew that it was the kid who had been at work, and I think that was the sickest minute in my life, next to the one in which I read his note to me.
I got the story in pieces and had to patch it together. Some of it may have been exaggerated a little, but altogether it made a pretty straight story. What had happened was something like this.
The kid brought that rat, Bud Crandall, into town. A bullet had raked Crandall along the ribs, but he hadn’t been hurt so bad that he couldn’t ride sixty miles. By the time he got to New Nineveh, he was feeling sick, of course, but he was feeling happy, too, because he knew that he had plenty of friends in that town. There were four cousins of his by name of Askew and Harper in New Nineveh, and as he got to the doctor’s house, he sent around word to them that he was in trouble and needed them.
They came in a bunch. You may have noticed that the gang spirit runs pretty high in all crooks like that. They work in bands wherever they can, and they make it a point always to hang together. They feel that it’s good fellowship. But it isn’t. It’s just low-down knowing that they may need each other someday. An honest man hates a crowd, but a thug hates to be alone.
Of course, when his cousins came, this Crandall lied to them about what had happened.
The doctor heard all about the story that Crandall told, which was that this Bunts had stuck him up while they were riding along side by side, and that Bunts had taken away sixty-five dollars of his money, but that he was such a new crook that he thought that was all the money that Crandall had, and so he didn’t search him any further
and didn’t get the hundred and eighty dollars besides that Crandall had in his wallet. He said that after the robbery, the kid decided that dead men tell no tales and shot him in cold blood, but when he found that Crandall was not dead, he was afraid to finish the job. The sight of the blood was too much for him. And he started to ride to New Nineveh.
In the light of what followed, you would think that the people in that town might guess that the kid was painted a little blacker than life. But they didn’t think. They didn’t like to think. They told me what a crook and what a coward the kid was just before they went to tell me how he had shot up the whole town. They couldn’t put two and two together and see that one half of their yarn spoiled the other half.
However, I didn’t point out any of those things to them. I wanted to get the story from them just as they understood it, because I knew that that was the way that it would come to the ears of the United States police. In a day or two, the yarn would be crystallized, and a hundred men would be willing to swear to the same sort of a story.
Well, I got the whole story, and it made out a better case for the kid than I had expected from the beginning of the yarn.
They said that after the four cousins of Crandall had heard this story of his about the holdup and the shooting, they asked Crandall how it happened that the kid had remained in the hotel after doing a job like this.
When the old goat with the whiskers got to that point, I held my breath, because I had been wondering a good deal on the same point. And the answer, according to Crandall, was simply that the kid had done it on a dare.
I could have groaned. Because I knew that this was the truth. It was the sort of thing that Dalfieri the Great would have done, and I could tell, now, that the kid was trying to model himself according to the example of the man that never was.
Yes, he had gone to the hotel and got a room there as calm as you please, and then he went down and got something to eat, and while he was eating there, something after midnight, the four cousins of Crandall came in.
